As the tradition continues, another US-based hardware review website gets the scoop on the upcoming Intel architecture. Whereas on previous occasions the scoop went to Anandtech, today Tom's Hardware Guide takes a first peek at the upcoming Core i7 4770K. Even though we will, of course, see the traditional Intel employees pop up on Twitter and Facebook stating that the performance indication of the used engineering samples is not on par with the performance of the eventual retail silicon, history has taught us that's nothing more than trying to keep the suspense going until the actual launch. Never has the reviewed ES silicon been any different from the final retail silicon, so why should it now?

In any case, THG has tested the latest revision of the Haswell Core i7 4770K CPU. With the launch set at Computex, less than three months from now, we can assume with a significant degree of certainty that they are using the latest silicon. As the conclusion stages, the "... Core i7-4770K is in the neighborhood of 7 to 13% faster than Core i7-3770K in today’s threaded workloads". Roughly what everyone had expected. As far as overclocking goes, Tom's Hardware Guide had the following to say: "I wasn’t able to overclock the Core i7-4770K I tested — largely because that’s no way to treat a borrowed CPU. But we’re certainly curious to see how a more mature process affects the architecture’s scalability". In my opinion, quite an interesting statement to make, given the CPU is a K-sku product, which is designed to be overclocked!

What conclusions you draw from that last statement, I leave up to you. But perhaps it might be interesting to look up the previous pre-NDA leaks from upcoming Intel architectures. Sadly enough, we are also missing system pictures as well as perhaps a couple of screenshots from CPU-Z or so. You know, just so we all know for sure the CPU was actually tested. In any case, no overclocking results means there's still something to look forward to at Computex. The tradeshow will be packed with overclocking demos and events. For more information, check out our Computex forum thread: click